The invention relates to an apparatus for producing packs made from especially thin plastic film, wherein the blanks can be successively severed from a continuous web of material and fed to a wrapping station in a (vertical) plane and, in the region of the wrapping station, folded around an article in a U-shaped manner, the article being (horizontally) conveyed transversely relative to the plane of the blank, especially around a group of individual packs for forming a bundle, and wherein the blanks can be severed in the region of a knife roller with suction bores, and a counter knife, and the web of material and the blanks can be transported by (upright) lateral suction belts. The packs to be produced are especially bundles made of a plurality of individual packs, in particular soft packs of folded paper tissues. The outer wrapping of such bundles is made from a thin plastic film which, owing to its technological properties, causes problems in the mechanical handling. Moreover, especially in the case of bundles of paper tissues, it is necessary to operate with different sizes of bundles, in particular depending on the number of desired individual packs per bundle.
To adjust the packaging machine to differing formats of bundles it is already known to provide for sets of replacement members which are assigned to the different formats of bundles. The sets of replaceable format-dependent folding members and other members are replaced in the packaging machine when the format is changed. Thereby, other format-independent members, especially a film appliance, are moved upwards to allow the exchange of the replacement sets (DE 41 38 138).